BECOME A SMART TESTER, NOT JUST AN ORDINARY TESTER

Based on my 6 years of experience in testing, I feel that many testers think their job is limited to finding and reporting bugs, and it is the job of developer to find out how and why the bug is introduced and then how to resolve. Of course, job of tester indeed is to find and report bugs. But then, what is the difference between tester and smart tester?
Here I would like to share my experience. I got chance to work in a challenging and complex project wherein I discovered that just regular testing won't help. I need to think beyond my role as a QA and be smarter.
Let me share a scenario. I had to share requests from one machine to different client’s machines. When I sent the request, it only went to 2 client machines out of 5. In the beginning, I didn’t pay much attention to this fact, as I was busy with some other complex testing areas. However, this issue came to our notice when another tester also faced the same problem. First, I checked hardware configurations, and took a look at the binaries. Then suddenly I had a thought about checking the software my application was using.
And, that was where I realized where the issue really was!
I found that 2 client machines that received the request had Microsoft Dot Net framework 2.0 with SP2 and the other 3 client machines (that did not receive the request) had Dot Net framework 2.0 with SP1. When I installed SP2 on these machines, the problem was solved. I discussed and told the developer about the solution.
Thinking over this, I realized that a tester should not only find and report defect/bug, but we should also dig out the root cause. We need to discuss with the developers why a defect has occurred and how it will be solved.
Do this, and believe me, your mind will definitely find even more complicated defects/Bugs!